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Doctors’ AI Stigma, Apple Watch BP Tracking, and Oracle Teams Up With OpenAI
September 15, 2025
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Together with
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“In the age of AI, human psychology remains the ultimate variable. The way people perceive AI use can matter just as much as, or even more than, the performance of the technology itself.”
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Johns Hopkins University’s Haiyang Yang
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The research headline of the week belongs to a study out of Johns Hopkins University that found “doctors who use AI are viewed negatively by their peers.”
Clickbait from afar, but far from clickbait. The investigation in npj Digital Medicine surfaced interesting takeaways after randomizing 276 practicing clinicians to evaluate one of three vignettes depicting a physician: using no GenAI (the control), using GenAI as a primary decision-making tool, or using GenAI as a verification tool.
- Participants rated the clinical skill of the physician using GenAI as a primary decision-making tool as significantly lower than the physician who didn’t use it (3.79 vs. 5.93 control on a 7-point scale).
- Framing GenAI as a “second opinion” or verification tool improved the negative perception of clinical skill, but didn’t fully eliminate it (4.99 vs. 5.93 control).
- Ironically, while an overreliance on GenAI was viewed as a weakness, the clinicians also recognized AI as beneficial for enhancing medical decision-making. Riddle us that.
Patients seem to agree. A separate study in JAMA Network Open took a look at the patient perspective by randomizing 1.3k adults into four groups that were shown fake ads for family doctors, with one key difference: no mention of AI use (the control), or a reference to the doctors using AI for administrative, diagnostic, or therapeutic purposes (Supplement 1 has all the ads).
For every AI use case, the doctors were perceived significantly worse on a 5-point scale:
- less competent – control: 3.85, admin AI: 3.71; diagnostic AI: 3.66; therapeutic AI: 3.58
- less trustworthy – control: 3.88; admin AI: 3.66; diagnostic AI: 3.62; therapeutic AI: 3.61
- less empathic – control: 4.00 ; admin AI: 3.80; diagnostic AI: 3.82; therapeutic AI: 3.72
Where’s that leave us? Despite pressure on clinicians to be early AI adopters, using it clearly comes with skepticism from both peers and patients. In other words, AI adoption is getting throttled by not only technological barriers, but also some less-discussed social barriers.
The Takeaway
Medical AI moves at the speed of trust, and these studies highlight the social stigmas that still need to be overcome for patient care to improve as fast as the underlying tech.
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Achieve Ambient AI Scale With Abridge
According to a new report from MIT, 95% of generative AI implementations fail. At Abridge, we have helped 150+ health systems scale ambient AI to tens of thousands of clinicians—many in a matter of weeks. For the first time ever, we are sharing those steep adoption curves at partners, along with impact metrics and testimonials from 19 health systems. If your ambient AI implementation isn’t scaling at speed, Abridge can help.
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- Oracle + OpenAI: Oracle is bringing OpenAI’s tech into its patient portal to provide plain-language explanations of diagnoses, test results, and treatment options. Patients will be able to ask clarifying questions about their medical record directly within the portal, such as spelling out an abbreviation or next steps after test results. Oracle’s stock was up 40% following the announcement, although shareholders were probably less excited about the patient portal than the new $300B cloud computing contract with none other than OpenAI.
- OpenEvidence Acquires Amaro: OpenEvidence continued its pedal-to-the-metal year by acquiring AI-powered advertising firm Amaro. The acquisition will help OpenEvidence scale a “modern, sustainable, and user-first advertising infrastructure” as it continues adding upwards of 90k clinicians per month. Seems like a decent enough use of the $210M Series B that just closed in July, especially when OpenEvidence is apparently already looking to raise another nine-figure round at a $6B valuation.
- Pharma Ads Threaten Trust: A longitudinal survey in JAMA Health Forum put a spotlight on physicians’ evolving perception of pharma marketing over the last decade. Researchers surveyed over 5k medical students in 2011, then 1.1k of the same trainees in 2024, finding that they were almost 3x more likely to agree that trust in medicine is threatened by the pharma industry’s marketing influence (5.6% vs. 14.5%). The poll showed increased agreement that med schools shouldn’t allow pharma to interact with students (59.6% vs. 72.2%), although it also found that more physicians believe they can receive useful drug info from marketing (66.3% vs. 76.9%).
- Apple Watch Targets Hypertension: Apple is rolling out long-awaited high blood pressure notifications on its latest watch, but there’s a catch: it doesn’t produce an estimate of systolic or diastolic BP. The feature, which is awaiting FDA clearance, uses 30-days of historical data to identify patterns indicative of hypertension, then prompts at-risk users to obtain a BP cuff for confirmation. The notification threshold will need to find the sweet spot between being set too low (false reassurance), set too high (unnecessary scares), and proper marketing (to avoid the Whoop treatment).
- Optain Series A: Optain Health locked in $26M of Series A funding to advance its AI platform that detects sight-threatening eye conditions like diabetic retinopathy and glaucoma while also assessing cardiovascular disease risk. It’s always a good sign when the investor roster includes seven leading systems like Memorial Hermann and Northwell Health, all of which will reportedly be deploying Optain across their networks to expand screening access and improve outcomes by integrating AI into tele-ophthalmology workflows.
- athenahealth Clinically Inferred Diagnosis: athenahealth is ramping up the announcements ahead of its Thrive customer event in November, including the debut of its AI-native diagnostic tool, Clinically Inferred Diagnosis. The new solution surfaces potential diagnoses and insights from the EHR along with links to supporting evidence (e.g. lab results, imaging studies, vitals, and clinical notes). It’s available directly within the athenaOne platform and “designed for busy practices searching for ease of use and experimentation without commitments.”
- Healthcare Props Up Job Market: The latest job report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that healthcare accounted for nearly all of August’s employment gains, adding approximately 31k new jobs – including 13k in ambulatory care and 9k in both hospitals and residential care. The overall economy added just 22k jobs while the unemployment rate rose to 4.3%, with healthcare offsetting declines in manufacturing, wholesale trade, and government employment. About one in six private-sector jobs in the U.S. are now in healthcare, or 23.5M in total.
- Goodpath Closes $18M: Virtual chronic condition management provider Goodpath landed $18M of Series A funding to deliver a single platform for weight management, MSK pain, sleep, diabetes, digestive health, and mental health. The AI platform leverages over 4.5M real-world data points from member assessments, treatments, and outcomes to inform dynamic care plans for Goodpath’s multidisciplinary care teams. The funds were earmarked for tuning the AI engine, expanding into new conditions, and investing in the pharmacy infrastructure to support GLP-1s.
- FDA to Release Faster Response Letters: The FDA said it would begin releasing complete response letters immediately after they are issued to companies with drugs under agency review. The letters often list deficiencies with applications that the agency is reviewing, and their public release can have negative implications for publicly traded firms. The FDA also published 89 previous unreleased letters from 2024 to present, each of which detailed “specific safety and effectiveness deficiencies” that prevented products from being approved.
- Better Than Expected Surgical Outcomes: An analysis from Vizient and the AHA found that hospitalized surgical patients were nearly 20% more likely to survive than expected in the first quarter of 2024, which was attributed primarily to advances in evidence-based care and tech-enabled safety practices. That said, the report also highlighted the challenge of balancing better outcomes with efficient hospital throughput, finding that the average length of stay for these patients increased by almost a full day in the past five years (higher acuity and payor-related delays in post-acute placement).
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Kennedy Community Health Finds RPM Success With Withings
When Kennedy Community Health needed a partner to support remote patient monitoring for its diverse patient population, it turned to Withings Health Solutions. See how Kennedy found success with its new program for uncontrolled hypertension using Withings’ RPM platform and connected devices, surpassing enrollment goals while unlocking better outcomes for its patients.
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Under the Hood of Navina’s AI
Navina’s AI engine harnesses over 600 proprietary algorithms to transform fragmented patient data into actionable clinical intelligence at the point of care. It’s shaped with the expertise of physicians to turn multiple data sources (EHR, HIE, claims, care gap files, etc.) into contextualized insights like suspected conditions or evidence for care gap closures – each linked back to the original source. Download the whitepaper to see examples of Navina’s AI in action.
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- Next Generation Ambient Technology and Agents: The ambient AI transformation is already sweeping across health systems, reducing administrative burdens and improving patient outcomes. So, what’s next? Tune into this on-demand session to learn how systems like Carle Health and Denver Health are leveraging Nabla to eliminate Pajama Time and build a future where agentic AI unlocks true workforce sustainability.
- Elevate 2025 – Medallion’s Virtual Conference Returns This Week: Now in its fourth year, Medallion’s annual conference is back – bringing together healthcare leaders to explore this year’s theme: Elevate the present. Reframe the future of healthcare. Hear from industry voices like Tom Lawry, author of Hacking Healthcare, UPMC Chief Medical Information Officer Robert Bart, and many more. Reserve your spot now.
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